Book Image

Openswan: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks

By : Ken Bantoft, Paul Wouters
Book Image

Openswan: Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks

By: Ken Bantoft, Paul Wouters

Overview of this book

<p>With the widespread use of wireless and the integration of VPN capabilities in most modern laptops, PDA's and mobile phones, there is a growing desire for encrypting more and more communications to prevent eavesdropping. Can you trust the coffee shop's wireless network? Is your neighbor watching your wireless? Or are your competitors perhaps engaged in industrial espionage? Do you need to send information back to your office while on the road or on board a ship? Or do you just want to securely access your MP3's at home? IPsec is the industry standard for encrypted communication, and Openswan is the de-facto implementation of IPsec for Linux.</p> <p>Whether you are just connecting your home DSL connection with your laptop when you're on the road to access your files at home, or you are building an industry size, military strength VPN infrastructure for a medium to very large organization, this book will assist you in setting up Openswan to suit those needs.</p> <p>The topics discussed range from designing, to building, to configuring Openswan as the VPN gateway to deploy IPsec using Openswan. It not only for Linux clients, but also the more commonly used Operating Systems such as Microsoft Windows and MacOSX. Furthermore it discusses common interoperability examples for third party vendors, such as Cisco, Checkpoint, Netscreen and other common IPsec vendors.</p> <p>The authors bring you first hand information, as they are the official developers of the Openswan code. They have included the latest developments and upcoming issues. With experience in answering questions on a daily basis on the mailing lists since the creation of Openswan, the authors are by far the most experienced in a wide range of successful and not so successful uses of Openswan by people worldwide.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Building and Integrating Virtual Private Networks with Openswan
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
Preface

Pre-Shared Keys (PSKs)


Sometimes you will need to connect Openswan to a device that cannot deal with RSA keys. When a VPN connection to such a device needs to be made, Openswan can use the PSK method. Imagine East is such a device. First, we would add the PSK to ipsec.secrets:

193.110.157.131 205.150.200.209 : PSK "secret shared by two hosts"

Then we set our West-East connection to use the PSK:

conn west-east
	left=193.110.157.131
	right=205.150.200.209
	authby=secret
	auto=start

Note that to use many PSK connections, for example if you have a lot of PSK-only network devices out in the field, you could put the authby=secret line in the conn %default section, and remove it from all the separate conn definitions.

Proper Secrets

Of course, using secret or any other human-readable word or phrase as a PSK is extremely insecure. Instead, the PSK should be generated from purely random characters. Since most vendors allow no more than 48 characters in base64 format, the following command would create...